Tag Archives: DaPone String Quartet

The DaPonte String Quartet’s program on Sunday, at Brunswick’s Unitarian Universalist Church, began with two fugues from Bach’s “Art of the Fugue,” which has been called the greatest masterwork in music, although it was written to teach rather than perform.

Cellist Myles Jordan points out, in his always perceptive program notes, that there are a number of problems with this attribution. One is Joseph Conrad’s observation that “All praise is invidious,” because it assumes that the person offering the praise is qualified to to give it.

A second is the effect on performers, which is like that on a modern sculptor given a chisel and asked to improve upon MIchelangelo’s David. It can’t be done, and the effect is near paralysis.

Of course Bach has to be performed to live at all, but one tries to approach it like any other score, without fear and trembling. The DaPonte gave it a good try, but could not seem to let themselves go, as they did with a more popular work, the Beethoven String Quartet in C Major, Op. 29.

With the able assistance of violist Katherine Murdock, they brought this melodic and sometimes quirky creature to life. It is easily accessible on first hearing, but there is some novel invention in each of the movements, just enough to delight without confusing: odd triplets in the first, huge empty rests and no resolution to the tonic in the second, a lovely canter across country, reminding one of the “Light Cavalry Overture,” in the third, and a switch from a gallop to a slower call and response, and back again, in the fourth, which also presages Beethoven’s later obsession with false cadences.

About the last work on the program, the Brahms String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111, Jordan pointed out the difficulties in balancing the cello part, which stems from a theme for the brass section of an orchestra, with the other voices in the quintet. The disparity was unnoticeable among the lush and familiar melodies the composer spreads lavishly throughout.

Brahms, perhaps believing that this was to be his last published work, seems to have let his hair down in the quintet, which is nowhere near as durch-componiert as most of his earlier works, beginning with an opening theme that sounds strangely Wagnerian. (Pardon the German, but there’s no other way to describe what composers do who work like a painter, seeing that a dab of color in the lower left-hand corner affects something else in the upper right.)

The first two movements are perfect examples of late Romanticism. The third seems an attempt to get back to more intellectual pursuits, with a strangely off-kilter treatment of triplets and a hearkening back to the principal theme of the first.

Finally, in the fourth, Brahms says “to Hell with it all,” and brings in a gypsy melody, ending with a totally unrelated Hungarian furiant that would have made Bartok proud. It received a well deserved sanding ovation.

The size of the overflow audience at the UUC attests to the success of the quartet’s policy of extending its outreach in Maine. I still think they may be spreading themselves too thin, but music lovers throughout the state have much to be grateful for.

Christopher Hyde is a writer and musician who lives in Pownal, He can be reached at classbeat@netscape.net.